The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story from Inside the Vatican

THE DIVORCE

OF HENRY VIII

The Untold Story from

Inside the Vatican

Catherine Fletcher

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For Mark

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Europe in 1527

The Casali Family

Preface

1 The King in Love and the Pope Besieged

2 How to Bribe a Cardinal (Part One)

3 A Short Tale of Kidnapping

4 Cardinal Campeggio Has Gout

5 The Vicar of Hell in Rome

6 Neither Fair nor Foul Will Serve

7 Livia Pallavicino, Heiress

8 The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey

9 A Coronation and a Wedding

10 The Scholar Croke Cries Foul

11 The Daily Frauds of the Brothers Casali

12 The Custom of England

13 Murder in Naples

14 How to Bribe a Cardinal (Part Two)

15 The Break with Rome

16 The Ingratitude of Princes

17 A Mother’s Tears

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map and family tree

1. Map of Europe in 1527 © 2011 John Bloxam for Upstream Ltd.

2. The Casali Family tree.

Illustration section

1. Charles V with his English Water-hound , Jakob Seisenegger (1532) © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

2. The Sack of Rome , unknown Netherlandish artist ( c . 1527) © Wellcome Library, London.

3. Henry VIII , Lucas Horenbout ( c . 1526–27). The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

4. Catherine of Aragon , attr. Lucas Horenbout ( c . 1525) © National Portrait Gallery, London.

5. Pope Clement VII , workshop of Sebastiano del Piombo ( c . 1531–32) © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

6. Portrait of Ferry Carondelet with his Secretaries , Sebastiano del Piombo ( c . 1510–12) © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

7. Anne Boleyn , unknown artist (late sixteenth century) © National Portrait Gallery, London.

8. The Rocca Pallavicino-Casali, Monticelli d’Ongina. Photo © author.

9. The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine , Filippino Lippi (1501), Chiesa di San Domenico, Bologna © 2011: Photo Scala Florence/Luciano Romano/ Fondo Edifici di Culto—Min. dell’Interno.

10. The Procession of Pope Clement VII and the Emperor Charles V after the Coronation at Bologna , Nicolaus Hogenberg ( c . 1532) © The British Library Board; shelfmark 144.g.3 (1.).

PREFACE

THE DIVORCE OF HENRY VIII from Catherine of Aragon is one of those great events of history. You probably know the story. Henry and Catherine have no sons, and Henry comes to believe that this is God’s punishment for marrying his brother’s widow. Henry falls in love with Anne Boleyn. He decides to have his marriage annulled, but the Pope refuses. Henry declares himself head of the Church of England, breaks with Rome and marries Anne. In fifty words or so, that is the famous tale.

On the other hand, you have probably never heard of Gregorio Casali. Which is strange, because for the six years it took Henry to divorce Catherine, he was our man in Rome, the resident diplomat looking after the king’s great matter at the papal court. He was one of the few, in fact, who saw the affair through from start to finish, although before the end of his short life Casali would have reason to curse the ingratitude of princes. For his loyalty to Henry, he said, he had paid a high price.

Casali enjoys a brief mention in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, misspelt as Gregory de Cassado, though it is surely him. And the fleeting notoriety of a reference in Shakespeare, albeit in a minor work, is not something many Italian noblemen of the period merit. Beyond that, he rarely escapes the footnotes. How is it that someone so close to something so great can be so nearly lost to history?

When I first came across Casali and his role in English diplomacy, I was working for the BBC in Westminster. When I had time on my hands, I used to watch people doing politics. Not, usually, in the House of Commons, but in coffee bars, on the street or waiting to go into the TV studios. My colleagues and I got to know who drank in which bar, and we speculated why. After I’d been around a few years, people occasionally told me stories that they hoped I’d pass on. Everyone knew that the important business rarely happened in official meetings. For some, it happened in the mythical corridors of power, for others in the mystical smoke-filled rooms.

And so, when I read those occasional references to Casali in the standard works of Tudor history, I wondered what he had done from day to day. How did he, and the people around him, do their politics, their diplomacy? Where did they do it, and when? What were the rules of the game? One particular thing intrigued me. Casali was an Italian. How could an Italian be ambassador to the King of England? If, for much of what happened in the world of diplomacy five hundred years ago, I could find at least a superficial parallel in the present, I could not find one for that.

Not quite ten years ago, I decided to try and track down Gregorio Casali, his life and work. Internet searches turned up an attorney-at-law in Massachusetts. I tried libraries: surely, the man who had spent six years of his life handling Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon would be the subject, if not of a book, then at least of an article or two. But no. As I said, it is strange that someone apparently so pivotal could be so lost from history.

The obvious explanation for that loss would be that Casali’s story isn’t worth the telling. But a little bit of investigation convinced me that wasn’t true. Gregorio Casali was a man who navigated what the great Renaissance thinker Erasmus called the turbulent waves of diplomacy, amid tumultuous times for Europe.¹ His story brings great events of history to life. It is, however, as much an Italian story as an English one. Through Casali’s eyes we see England from the outside: from Rome, from Italy, from Europe. There, Henry VIII is not the caricature fat tyrant, nor yet the virtuous Renaissance prince, but a mid-ranking northern monarch, a player on the European stage but far from the star of the show. Reading Casali’s letters, we learn much about how the diplomacy of Henry’s divorce worked from day to day, and about how to make a fortune (or try to) by throwing your lot in with a foreign power. His tale tells us about family values, and all sorts of things about living in sixteenth-century Europe: how to get from A to B, how to make a present, how to bribe a cardinal, when to go out in disguise and why it was a good idea to have a secretary who knew the local courtesans. We learn about kidnapping, spying, deciphering coded letters and other dirty tricks. And about the importance of being magnificent. Our man in Rome was good at that.

Gregorio Casali was born around the year 1500 in Rome—a Rome ruled by the infamous Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia. The Borgia papacy would become a byword for corruption, murder and tyranny: everything that, for reformers, was wrong with the Church. And our man in Rome was a child of war. Renaissance Italy might have been home to Leonardo and Michelangelo, but it was a land of terror and conflict too. In 1494, Charles VIII, King of France, had marched his armies into Italy, and the Italian peninsula had become the setting for a European war that would last for decades, between the great rival powers France and the Holy Roman Empire. England allied with one or other of them—usually, but not always, the Empire. The French were long-time enemies. It was hard for the English to make a direct impact in distant Italy, but they could provide a northern distraction for troops who would otherwise be engaged in Italian conflicts or supply much-needed cash to their allies’ coffers.

In 1503, Pope Alexander VI died. His successor, Pius III, the compromise candidate, ruled for a bare four weeks, to be followed by Pope Julius II of the Italian della Rovere family. Aptly known as the warrior pope, Julius took up arms to secure the papacy’s territorial possessions in central Italy, the swathe of land known as the Papal States, stretching north from Rome, past Perugia and over to Ravenna on the Adriatic coast. In 1506, he and his army marched on Bologna and expelled its ruling clan, the Bentivoglio, re-establishing papal dominion over the city. But as pope after pope conducted himself more like secular prince than Vicar of Christ, and as each papal military campaign demanded more resources from the Christians of Europe, calls for religious reform grew. To subsidise their enterprises, the popes sold indulgences, discounting time in Purgatory in return for donations to the Church. One notable case of indulgence-peddling in Germany, during the reign of Pope Leo X de’ Medici, prompted particular outrage. In 1517, in protest at such abuse of believers, a young Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church door. With an eye to their own wealth, and with few qualms about curtailing Church influence, some German princes were prepared to tolerate Luther and his ideas, though when peasants and townspeople tied the new religion to demands for social reform, their revolts were soon suppressed. These new ideas were known in England too. Many of Henry VIII’s counselors had studied in Europe, but the suggestion that their king, within a few years, might join the Lutheran princes and break with Rome would have been preposterous then. After all, in 1521 Henry had written a book against Luther. His defense of the seven sacraments had been presented to the Pope, and in return the king had received the title Defender of the Faith, maintained by English monarchs to this day.

As Gregorio Casali made his way into the English diplomatic service in the 1520s, France, ruled by King Francis I, was still at war with the Holy Roman Empire—a conglomerate of the German lands, Austria and, by a quirk of inheritance, Spain, too—ruled by the Habsburg dynasty in the person of Charles V (Plate 1). In 1525, Charles’s troops had captured Francis at the Battle of Pavia, and Francis had freed himself only by handing over his sons as hostages. But if Charles was heading for victory on the western front, he had problems in the east. The Empire was also at war with the Turks, whose sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had established himself as one of Europe’s military giants, conquering Hungary, Rhodes and swathes of north Africa. For opponents of Habsburg power, Suleiman was undoubtedly a useful ally, despite papal injunctions that the Christian princes should stick together.

So, a Protestant challenge in the north; the Catholic princes at war; the French princes imprisoned; the Ottoman Turks under Suleiman, pushing ever further west: this was the world of our man in Rome.

To write Casali’s story has been a long and intriguing piece of historical detective work. From the usual sources in London, I began with the story of the divorce. (Technically, Henry was not seeking a divorce but a declaration that his marriage was invalid; however, his contemporaries used the word, and I see no reason to avoid it.²) But although the London letters—those written by Casali and his colleagues to Henry VIII, Wolsey and others at court—gave me scraps of detail about his life, much was still missing. Next, I went to Bologna, Casali’s home town. His family palazzo is long demolished, courtesy of a nineteenth-century road-widening scheme, but in the archives I found detail of his business dealings, and those of his family, and in old chronicles of the city passing references that linked him to important political figures in Rome. I saw his family chapel and his memorial in the Church of San Domenico. One chilly December day, I took a trip to the small northern town of Parma to see if I could find any news of his wife, and I found a little. My big stroke of luck, though, came a few stops up the railway line in Piacenza. I had gone there on my way to see the Rocca Pallavicino-Casali, a castle once owned by Gregorio’s descendants, in the village of Monticelli d’Ongina near the River Po. I dropped in to the State Archive to ask whether they had any documents relating to Casali. It was a long shot. Nothing was listed in the archive guide. But, the archivist told me, the Casali family still lived in Piacenza. In fact, they had their own private archive: boxes of papers documenting births, marriages and deaths dating back more than five hundred years.

Next stop was Rome and the Vatican. More details, more pieces in the jigsaw. Especially marvelous were the records of Cardinal Accolti’s trial for abuse of power, where I found Casali’s secretary giving evidence of his master’s attempts at bribery. The cardinal’s letters (in Florence) were remarkable too. Meanwhile, a researcher at Columbia University had discovered an entirely new set of Casali letters—intercepted by Imperial spies and filed in Vienna. The dispatches of the Mantuan diplomats in Rome added glorious color to the story of Henry’s divorce. And more details kept turning up: Casali’s brother appears as a character in a sixteenth-century Venetian best-seller; portrait medals of his uncle survive in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. I began to piece together the details of a short but intensely complex life and a family network that stretched from Constantinople in the east to London in the north. There are still gaps: no portrait of Casali survives, for example, although his code name, Capo Pelato—the bald man—strongly hints at a distinguishing feature.³

The historians who come across Gregorio Casali have, usually, taken his letters and scavenged from them the facts of Henry’s divorce. He has become a faceless source of dates and detail. But Casali—the real Casali—did not exist for the convenience of Tudor history students. He had his own interests. Sometimes he had an axe to grind. He certainly liked to make a good impression. At Henry’s court, and at courts throughout Europe and beyond, appearances counted for a lot. Whenever Gregorio wrote to England, he did so with that in mind. So, can we rely on him? Did he sometimes bend the truth in order to tell people what they wanted to hear? He was prepared to lie and deceive for Henry; did he ever lie to his masters? How far did he flatter, embellish and spin? In Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana, the hero Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in need of money, finds an opportunity to pay his daughter’s finishing-school fees by taking the job of British agent in Cuba and then faking a series of espionage reports. Was Casali doing the same: stringing the English along for the sake of his daughter’s dowry? Some people thought so. Gregorio’s fellow agent Richard Croke accused the Casali family of sabotage. Was he right?

We shall see. This, then, is the story of our man in Rome: a man who was not himself great, but who knew the great men of history. And a man who found himself, quite unexpectedly, at the heart of a king’s great matter.

1

THE KING IN LOVE AND THE POPE BESIEGED

ON FRIDAY, MAY 17, 1527, a secret trial began in Westminster. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister, prince of the Holy Roman Church and papal legate a latere, presided over the hearings. At stake was the validity of Henry’s marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon. After eighteen years together, they had only one surviving child, a daughter, Mary. Was the lack of a son God’s verdict on a union against divine law? Henry had convinced himself it was so. Might a different queen succeed in producing an heir for England where Catherine had not? Perhaps, and besides, Henry was in love with another woman: Anne Boleyn.¹

News traveled slowly in sixteenth-century Europe. Even in good circumstances, the journey from Rome to London took an experienced courier two weeks. As Wolsey’s proceedings opened, none of the participants knew that for almost a fortnight Pope Clement VII, most of his cardinals and several hundred others—among them Gregorio Casali—had been besieged in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.

Not yet thirty, Casali had been in the English royal service for the past eight years, as messenger, as soldier and now as Henry VIII’s ambassador to the Holy See. The son of a Bolognese merchant and a Roman noblewoman, he had done well for himself. Family connections in the curia and a guardian in the College of Cardinals had helped. But with Spanish troops and German landsknechts now running amok through Rome, his enjoyment of a lavish ambassadorial lifestyle was temporarily in abeyance.

The Sack had begun on May 6, when mutinous troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, stormed the fog-bound streets. Their pay months in arrears, they went in search of loot. Pope Clement fled from his sumptuous apartments at the Vatican to his fortress at the Castel Sant’Angelo on the banks of the Tiber. The city outside was pillaged, palace after palace ransacked. Its citizens were kidnapped, tortured and murdered. A contemporary painting shows, in the foreground, some of the horrors (Plate 2). Thousands, probably, died, and many more fled. Even nuns and priests were not immune from attack. The tomb of Pope Julius II was opened and his corpse despoiled. Churches were plundered and relics destroyed in a fashion that horrified contemporary observers. The Sack, said more than one, was God’s vengeance on a corrupt and failing priesthood.² The hundreds inside the castle tried as best they could to defend themselves. They had supplies of ammunition and food to last perhaps a month.

Since 1494, the Italian peninsula had been the theater for a series of European wars waged between the two great powers of the period, France and the Holy Roman Empire. Italy was divided into a series of small states that vied for great-power backing. The Pope ruled his own Papal States like any other prince. The Marquis of Mantua presided over his principality and the dukes of Urbino and Ferrara theirs; Genoa would soon rebel against French control and become a republic once again, like that other great maritime power, Venice, which ruled much of the Adriatic. In the turmoil that followed the Sack, the city of Florence had broken with the Pope, expelled the Medici family and declared itself a republic. But Pope Clement—Giulio de’ Medici—hoped to restore his exiled clan to the pre-eminence it had once enjoyed in that city. As the Venetian ambassador Gasparo Contarini wrote, Clement had an infinite desire for Florence.³ That desire colored his actions. At the time of the Sack, ranged against Charles V were Francis I, King of France, Pope Clement VII, the republics of Venice and Florence, and Francesco II Sforza, Duke of Milan. England had not yet formally taken sides, but Henry and his chief minister Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the man responsible for England’s diplomacy, would in practice defend the papacy.

Castel Sant’Angelo, the fortified mausoleum of the ancient emperor Hadrian to which Clement and his court had retreated, was surrounded by bastions from which the snipers of the papal garrison took aim at Imperial targets. On its top floors were elegant living quarters, built to afford the popes a modicum of comfort on such occasions; high up on the loggia, the Pope’s men were well placed to defend the bridge over the Tiber below. From the top of the castle, where the statue of the warrior archangel Michael now stands, there was a commanding view of the city, although the besieged men of the curia might have reflected that they commanded very little indeed. All they could do was wait, fire back, and hope for relief from the armies of France and its allies in the League of Cognac. The siege was not impossibly tight: some messages went in and out of the castle, though at considerable risk to their bearers. Pietro Cavallucchio, a man we will meet again in this story, made it out, sent by the Pope to Deruta, a hundred miles north, where the League’s army was camped. He bore the message that Clement would rather risk his life than come to an arrangement with Charles V’s commanders.⁴

Three weeks into the siege, by the beginning of June, it was clear that Rome would not be relieved. The countryside around Deruta had been exhausted the previous summer.⁵ Hunger, lack of supplies and bad weather took their toll; the League’s army began its retreat. In the city now, food was scarce. Hostages were threatened with death if they did not pay extortionate ransoms. There was more looting; the plague began to spread. Fearing attack, few ventured out to their farms and vineyards, or to feed livestock, storing trouble for the months ahead. Imperial commanders, many of them Italian noblemen serving Charles V in the hope of reward, struggled to control their troops, who threatened mutiny if they were not paid. This was the troubled backdrop to Henry’s design for divorce.

It is sometimes hard to pin down the truth of events in the story of Gregorio Casali, but hardest of all in these days of the Sack—days surrounded by myth and imaginings. If we like, we can picture him on the castle ramparts, sniping at the Spanish: he was a military man, that would be plausible. We might imagine him offering urgent counsel to Clement on his next move, or in a quieter moment swapping louche tales with his friend Benedetto Accolti, who had just acquired a cardinal’s hat with fulsome promises of cash. It was a far cry from the convivial world of ceremonial entries, dinner parties, minor spying and exchange of gossip that Casali had joined in 1525, when, hoping for a step up the social ladder, he had become Henry VIII’s man in Rome.

A handful of details about Casali’s activities in these days are more certain. We know that he had already pawned his family silver and jewels to help the French embassy raise funds for Rome’s defense. Hoping to make a thousand crowns, he and Nicolas Raince, the French embassy secretary, had managed just six hundred. Ambassadors needed deep pockets, for they often subsidized their masters’ adventures for months, if not years. And these were hard times for the Casali. In April, Spanish troops had burnt their country villa, causing damage, so Gregorio’s brother Giambattista said, to the tune of sixteen thousand ducats, five times Gregorio’s annual stipend from the English.⁶ Fortunately for Gregorio, his mother’s family, the Caffarelli, rich Roman nobles traditionally allied to the Holy Roman Empire, would endure the Sack better than most.

We hear, too, from an Imperial report that Casali was one of four deputies appointed by the Pope to represent those besieged in the castle: he acted for his fellow patricians; his colleague Alberto Pio da Carpi (an Italian diplomat in the French service) for the ambassadors; Gianmatteo Giberti, Bishop of Verona, represented the prelates; and Giuliano Leno the merchants and artisans.⁷ Whether they were chosen by Clement or pressed on him by others in the castle is unclear. But whatever the mechanism, the choice of Casali points both to his good standing among his fellow Romans and also to the influence he wielded as English ambassador. For a diplomat was never simply himself. He personified his prince. When Casali negotiated, he negotiated as a Roman, but he commanded too a certain royal authority. Indeed, his very decision to stay in the siege made a statement about Henry’s support for Clement. (It must have been his decision: there was no time for him to receive instructions.) He might well have gone elsewhere. The ambassadors of Venice and Urbino had taken refuge with Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, Marchioness of Mantua, whose son Ferrante commanded Imperial forces and whose favor the Casali family enjoyed. But Gregorio was smart enough to realize that putting himself at the heart of the papal defense would earn him gratitude from Cardinal Wolsey and win Henry favor with the Pope.

Almost as soon as the siege began, the diplomacy got under way. The talks centered on money—money badly needed to pay the Imperial mercenaries rioting through Rome. At first, the Imperialists demanded three hundred thousand ducats as the price for ending the siege. Clement made a counter offer, then demurred. News of the Sack had still not reached England. The secret trial of Henry’s marriage continued: on May 20, on the twenty-third and the thirty-first. On June 1, the news arrived, and proceedings came to an abrupt stop. If the Pope’s Holiness fortune either to be slain or taken, as God forbid, wrote Wolsey to Henry the following day, it shall not a little hinder Your Grace’s affairs.⁸ He was right. Queen Catherine of Aragon could appeal to the Pope against any sentence on the validity of her marriage. She was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, whose troops held Clement prisoner, and Renaissance blood was viscous indeed.

The marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon (Plates 3 and 4) was a political one, which is not to say their relationship was less than cordial. It was rare for the princes and princesses of early modern Europe to wed for love. Marriages were the cement for political alliances, a tool of the trade in diplomatic negotiations. This particular match had consolidated Anglo-Spanish ties against a mutual enemy, France. Catherine had been married to Henry’s elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1501, but Arthur had died less than six months later, and in 1503 she was betrothed to Henry. Marriage to a brother’s widow required a dispensation from the Pope, and this was duly obtained, although in the event the pair wed only after Henry’s accession to the throne, on June 11, 1509. But if royal marriages were made for political reasons, they were also, sometimes, unmade. Henry’s sister Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scotland, had had her second marriage (to the Earl of Angus) annulled by Clement in March 1527, just weeks before our story begins. Louis XII of France had had his marriage annulled too, in 1498, when, for political reasons, he wanted to make a dynastic alliance with his brother’s widow, Anne of Brittany. His legal argument had been quite dubious, but Pope Alexander VI had been on his side, and that was enough. It was not hard to find a technical inadequacy in the betrothal paperwork on which to base an annulment, particularly when everyone involved agreed that the discovery of such an inadequacy was highly desirable. In Henry’s case, however, there would be no such easy agreement.

Religious notions of marriage as inviolable, therefore, rarely entered the maneuvering of Henry’s diplomats. It was all about realpolitik. At the papal court, diplomacy was not, very often, a religious matter. The Pope was a curious sort of prince, who on the one hand played a game very similar to his secular counterparts but on the other enjoyed a special status as the Vicar of Christ on Earth. Religious notions would be more important in Catherine of Aragon’s opposition to the divorce, though as important was her honor as a queen and the possibility that she might be reduced from that status and her daughter bastardized in favor of the upstart Anne Boleyn and her offspring. Anne as Henry’s mistress would be one thing: royal mistresses were an accepted feature of court life. Indeed, Henry had once offered her just that role, only later realizing that she might also solve the problem of a legitimate male heir for England. Anne as queen was another matter altogether.⁹

It was a month before Clement and the Imperialists agreed on an accord. The deal showed the weakness of Clement’s position: the ransom demand had increased from three to four hundred thousand ducats. On June 7, 1527, the siege came to an end, and Imperial troops took possession of Castel Sant’Angelo, with Pope and cardinals still inside. As the papal garrison left the castle with colors flying, Gregorio Casali was among its leaders. Even in defeat, they put on a good show. They were escorted out of Rome and headed north toward Perugia. Never one to miss an opportunity for testimony to his merits, Casali brought with him a fistful of thank-you letters to Wolsey extolling his good services: from Clement himself, from cardinals Farnese, Pucci, Gaddi, Campeggio and Benedetto Accolti.¹⁰ The impact of the Sack on contemporary politics was dramatic, and Casali’s month in the Castel Sant’Angelo had done him much credit.

In the next two weeks, Gregorio Casali traveled to Florence, Bologna, Ferrara and beyond. Our man in Rome had responsibilities covering most of the Italian peninsula. As an eyewitness to the horrors of the Sack, he would have been able to testify to the chaos in Rome. In Florence he rallied the city against the emperor. In Bologna, his father’s home town and the second city of the Papal States, he drew on family connections to raise troops. Gregorio’s kin were—as we shall discover—central to the conduct of his diplomacy. In Ferrara he had talks with Duke Alfonso d’Este, once again with the aim of bolstering papal territory. On the evening of June 22, he arrived in Venice, where he stayed with his brother Giambattista at San Giorgio Maggiore, a Dominican monastery with fine cloisters and a beautiful setting on its own small island next to the long strip of land known as Giudecca, across the water from St. Mark’s Square. Not long after Gregorio’s own promotion to ambassador to Rome in 1525, he had contrived to have the English appoint Giambattista, previously a member of the papal household, ambassador to Venice. On his arrival he addressed the Venetian College in a meeting that the suspicious Imperial ambassador Alonso Sanchez recorded as having lasted more than three